About Jeff
JEFF PIERSON has written extensively for over three decades about the people, products, and companies transforming the global energy industry. As the author of Battery Revolution, Jeff brings his first-hand career experience into a sweeping story about the promise and pitfalls of technology development.
Q & A
In his debut novel, Battery Revolution, Jeff Pierson shows how a creative story about two companies struggling to contain a rogue AI on the power grid can become a must-read for students, company teams, and self-learners of all ages.
Q: What caused you to write this book?
Jeff: I didn’t plan on writing a novel! Two years ago, I was involved in a project to build a junior executive training platform with an online education company. Academic and corporate learning had gone from “e-learning” to “micro learning” to an endless supply of STEM-related content. What was missing, though, were practical ways to give people seeking to advance into C-suite positions the “BizOps” skills executive recruiters look for. That means hard skills like data analysis, budgeting and planning, but also soft skills, like knowing how to work inside an organization, become part of a team, make decisions, and become good at persuading and convincing other people.
Q: What was the result?
Jeff: We fell prey to a textbook mentality. We tried creating courses to explain rather than show how to gain skills in business operations. It really takes hands-on experience to become a senior decision maker. So I shifted gears, and thought about writing an original story about parts of my own life and what sort of insight and understanding people needed for an entrepreneurial career.
Q: Where does Battery Revolution fit in terms of a book genre?
Jeff: It is business fiction, a management-oriented novel like Goldratt’s The Goal, or Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese?. In these types of books, a suspenseful plot and relatable characters and fables becomes an enjoyable book, and by the end of the story, readers come away having learned a lot of things. Battery Revolution has some hefty technical and business sections, which I hope are tolerable, and I’ll let readers decide where the book fits on the shelf. Even with a few wildly improbable scenes, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine living in this world.
Q: What central issues are you exploring in your book?
Jeff: The core question is one nobody in the energy and power industry can or even wants to answer: How will we meet all our needs for electricity? “Who decides” how the power grid will be managed is another intensely human question. The book explores our societal anxieties about machine control, and shows how our fears influence openness to change.
Q: Talk about your protagonist, Amelia Chen.
Jeff: Amelia is a bright materials scientist born in California getting her PhD in Pittsburgh at the start of the book. She’s an all-American kid—personable and confident, but after her lab discovery, she gets caught up in the tech world and her mindset gets thrown off kilter. The most interesting aspect of Amelia’s story might be how she confronts preconceived notions of what success and happiness really mean.
Q: How did you manage to pack so much technical subject matter into a suspense novel?
Jeff: I followed a formula to write separate parts of the book that when joined together resembled the stages of industrial technology development and manufacturing. I drew on my own experience in battery storage, fund investing, policy making, and business consulting.
Q: You’ve acknowledged using AI in your research and writing process.
Jeff: Absolutely. In addition to Google searches, I used Anthropic’s Claude, Grammarly, Quillbot, and AI writing tools in Microsoft Word. Battery Revolution is my original work. It has zero AI content, but LLMs are clearly useful as a writing resource. I believe Gen AI will inspire people to do more thorough research and write more books, which will play a big part in democratizing learning and career education.
Q: Who is your target audience for this book?
Jeff: College and graduate students studying business operations, entrepreneurship, and the energy industry, as well as corporate teams, investors, trade associations, policy makers, or just people looking to advance or learn or pivot into new areas.
Q: You’ve described this book as a learning experience for readers. What do you mean?
Jeff: I have two ideas for follow-on books. We really don’t know how this story of our electricity grid ends. There’s an unsung human element in managing technology that is forcing sacrifices and ethical dilemmas we need to face.